Headlines:
PayPal Offers a Web Site for Spaniards Citizens of R.I. Hires Message Provider MnIPC Expands Credit Union Offerings Fiserv: 49 Start-Up Clients in 12 Months
PayPal Offers a Web Site for Spaniards
PayPal Inc., the San Jose payments subsidiary of the online auction giant eBay Inc., has opened a Web site for customers in Spain.
PayPal.es is written in Spanish for a local audience and uses euros as the default currency, PayPal said Tuesday. The site is integrated into eBay's Spanish auction site.
"The Spanish eBay community has been requesting a local PayPal site for some time now," Mathias Entenmann, PayPal's vice president of international business, said in a press release.
PayPal has said a key part of its growth strategy is to launch local versions of its Web site in countries where eBay has a strong user base. PayPal started a U.K. Web site in late 2003 and has since added sites for customers in Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, and Canada.
Citizens of R.I. Hires Message Provider
Citizens Financial Group Inc., the Providence, R.I., retail banking arm of Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, is working with EnvoyWorldWide Inc. of Bedford, Mass., to deliver automated telephone messages to some customers.
EnvoyWorldWide said last week that it sent interactive voice messages to about 2,500 customers in April telling them how to sign up for e-mail notifications of account activity.
Barbara Cottam, a spokeswoman for Citizens, said in an interview last week that the customers were all former customers of Charter One Financial Inc. of Cleveland, which Citizens acquired in May of last year.
The customers had all subscribed to voice alerts, but not e-mail alerts, she said. "We were notifying them to switch to e-mail."
Ben Levitan, the president and chief executive of EnvoyWorldWide, said its calls used personal customer details provided by Citizens to verify the identity of the recipients. The automated service also would call customers back if they were not initially available and would offer to transfer people to a call center employee.
MnIPC Expands Credit Union Offerings
Minnesota Item Processing Corp. has added branch-capture and image-return features to its check-image offerings for credit unions.
Peter A. Skaalen, the chief operating officer for both the item-processing outsourcing company and its majority owner, the Minnesota Credit Union Network, said Wednesday that the branch-capture capability has been available for about two months and the image-return one for about a month.
The for-profit credit union service provider, known as MnIPC, is using software from the Advanced Financial Solutions unit of Marshall & Ilsley Corp.'s Metavante Corp. MnIPC has used other components of the AFS ImageVision check imaging suite since 2000 and participates in Metavante's Endpoint Exchange Network, Mr. Skaalen said.
Though MnIPC is sending both forward and return check images over Endpoint, Mr. Skaalen said it is printing most items out as image replacement documents at its processing center in Bloomington to be trucked eight miles to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
"Most institutions around the country today are still not ready to receive images," Mr. Skaalen said. MnIPC would consider sending image files to the Minneapolis Fed in the future using FedForward, the central bank's system for accepting check images for presentment, but "it all comes down to pricing," he said. "We have to make sure they can do it cheaper than we can."
MnIPC pilot tested the branch-capture technology with two of its customer credit unions and added a third about a month ago, Mr. Skaalen said.
Demand for the service is strong in the upper Midwest, where bad weather can delay couriers, cause missed deadlines, and raise collection risk, he said. "We have a number of our credit unions stacked up, waiting to go."
Fiserv: 49 Start-Up Clients in 12 Months
The Brookfield, Wis., banking technology and outsourcing provider Fiserv Inc. said it has landed a string of customers for its core processing services.
Fiserv said Tuesday that it has signed up 49 start-up banks and thrifts in the past 12 months, including 23 in the first five months of this year. In the past five years it has signed up 179 start-up banks and thrifts as core processing customers.
Sherry Price, the chief operating officer of Pan Pacific Bank of Fremont, Calif., which plans to open next month, said in a Fiserv press release, "We wanted a single source, so we wouldn't have to deal with a lot of vendors."
